Russia and Ukraine

[Deesse23]

Looks like the new guy is gonna be the Russian version of Albert Speer. 😜

[Pat Mustard]

Looks like the new guy is gonna be the Russian version of Albert Speer. 😜

What, does a shitty job, gets loads of slaves killed as a result and then lies his arse off after the war to embiggen his ego?

[The Grand Nudger]

Probably, right?

For context. Gazprom lost 7 billion usd last year, the first net loss in 20 years, while amounting to approx 10% of war funding. Gazprom does not expect to turn a profit this year either, and moscow has already announced that they will be leaning more heavily on gazprom this year (and everyone else, really). The underlying issue is simple. Russia is a gas station with nukes being taken advantage of by it's allies...of which there are few. They're extracting and shipping more product for less money to fewer purchasers...and the only way to turn the graph right side up would be to invest in infrastructure which the russian gas sector has long relied on western entities to build and operate.

In that situation, it's easy to see why you might want an economist running the show, as opposed to a cement baron. Will he be effective, who knows. I'd like to believe that they can't all be completely incompetent. I do think that anyone clever enough to find a way out of this bind is not likely to view the invasion of ukraine as a good place to put those realized gains, though.

[Leonardo17]

Probably, right?  

For context.  Gazprom lost 7 billion usd last year, the first net loss in 20 years, while amounting to approx 10% of war funding.  Gazprom does not expect to turn a profit this year either, and moscow has already announced that they will be leaning more heavily on gazprom this year (and everyone else, really).  The underlying issue is simple.  Russia is a gas station with nukes being taken advantage of by it's allies...of which there are few.  They're extracting and shipping more product for less money to fewer purchasers...and the only way to turn the graph right side up would be to invest in infrastructure which the russian gas sector has long relied on western entities to build and operate.  

In that situation, it's easy to see why you might want an economist running the show, as opposed to a cement baron.  Will he be effective, who knows.  I'd like to believe that they can't all be completely incompetent.  I do think that anyone clever enough to find a way out of this bind is not likely to view the invasion of ukraine as a good place to put those realized gains, though.

    Russia is moving into an economy of war. The economy in Ukraine is still running and business owners are asking Vladimir Zelensky not to recruit everyone in order to keep the economy running. In WWI France’s population was 40 million and 4 million soldiers were mobilized at the front. Today’s population of Ukraine is also 40 million and about 900,000 soldiers are on active duty (with 2,5 million being on reserve). Russia has 1,350,000 active troops (and 2 million on reserve). So this is a different type of war. I think Putin is about to ruin whatever is left of the Russian economy and put even more resources into this war. I don’t know about Poland and the Baltic states. I think he want Belarus + Ukraine + the Caucasus + Central Asia back into the orbit of Russia. He is not going to get Ukraine, that’s for sure. But it seems like history might repeat itself in Georgia if the West doesn’t do anything to support them (if anything can be done to support them of course)  
 
Mr. Blinken is really good with the guitar. I cannot say the same for his singing:

[The Grand Nudger]

Russia has returned to threatening the world with nuclear weapons, so it must be going very well.

[Jackalope]

Russia has returned to threatening the world with nuclear weapons, so it must be going very well.

Classic Russian maskirovka.

There's a non-zero chance that some enterprising colonels sold all their nukes for scrap. Jokes aside, I wonder how many of them are viable.

[Jackalope]

I mean, Russia/Soviet U. has been threatening the west with nuclear war for all of our lives, except for the those born before they had enough to do so.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Russia has returned to threatening the world with nuclear weapons, so it must be going very well.

Classic Russian maskirovka.

There's a non-zero chance that some enterprising colonels sold all their nukes for scrap.  Jokes aside, I wonder how many of them are viable.

Many of the tanks in the vaunted reserve park of Russian tanks have been found stripped of armor interstices, hence they're pretty useless -- as is shown in the Turret Launch Olympics™.

I wonder how much of that same corruption has degraded Russian nuclear capability.

[Jackalope]

Classic Russian maskirovka.

There's a non-zero chance that some enterprising colonels sold all their nukes for scrap.  Jokes aside, I wonder how many of them are viable.

Many of the tanks in the vaunted reserve park of Russian tanks have been found stripped of armor interstices, hence they're pretty useless -- as is shown in the Turret Launch Olympics™.

I wonder how much of that same corruption has degraded Russian nuclear capability.

I wouldn't bet real money against it.

[Fake Messiah]

Putin's tactical techniques are a joke: no one knows what is the point of his attacks and his soldiers are dying like flies

Putin’s new Russian empire is a farce, albeit a nightmarishly bloody one. And his Victory Day offensive is a farce, too. Less than two weeks after the first Russian platoons marched across Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, just north of Kharkiv, the Russian operation has ground to a halt after just a few miles.

Even worse for the nearly 500,000-person Russian army of occupation in Russia, the northern offensive has overextended Russian logistics and armor support and forced unprotected infantry to attack on foot. The Russian casualty rate was high before Victory Day. Now it’s catastrophically high as Ukrainian mechanized brigades reinforce the northern front.

It’s even possible the Russians suffered their bloodiest day of the 27-month wider war as the northern offensive culminated. There were a record 1,740 Russian casualties on May 12, according to the Ukrainian defence ministry. That’s hundreds more daily casualties than the Russians suffered in previous weeks.

No one outside of the Kremlin knows what the offensive’s actual military objectives were supposed to be. But in strictly military terms, the offensive almost certainly wasn’t worth it. Not only did the Russians fail to gain control of any important terrain, they also squandered offensive firepower that might have made more of a difference elsewhere along the 700-mile front line.

The offensive, just like the whole wider war, is political theatre. And in theatre, appearances are more important than reality. All Putin has to do to make his theatrical offensive successful, for the audience that truly matters to him – his regime and its supplicants among everyday Russians – is for Putin to redefine what “successful” means, and declare victory.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05...-brigades/